Engineers at N.C. State have developed new modifications to help pilots of small aircraft avoid midair collisions.

Pilots of small planes use a system called “cockpit displays of traffic information,” or CDTIs, which display information about other planes in the vicinity. However, the display does not account for one plane on the screen moving faster than another, so the pilot typically focuses on the closest plane, even if a plane farther away poses a higher risk.

“Our goal was to modify a CDTI to help pilots recognize which other planes pose the greatest risk,” says Carl Pankok, lead author of a study on the work and a Ph.D. student in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at N.C. State. “And it worked.”

Of course, aircraft deaths are rare. The general population risk of a death in an air carrier is one in 2 million, while the risk for a death in a motor vehicle accident is about on out of 7,700, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Still, Pankok points out that being safer is never a bad thing.

“These pilots were already pretty good, but the modified CDTIs made them better,” he said. “Their percentage of ‘correct’ decisions – minimizing risk – jumped from 88 percent to 96 percent. And their response times in scenarios where the farther aircraft was the higher-risk aircraft were cut in half; from 7.2 seconds to 3.7 seconds for blinking CDTIs, and to 4 seconds for yellow CDTIs.”

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